Throughout the whole of my conscious childhood, I knew social workers in one form or other. I'm glad I did. They're nowhere near as unpleasant as everyone says they are.

People find social workers annoying because of the necessarily paternalistic and bureaucratic aspects of what they do. They process dysfunctions in society with some limited resources and techniques, without being able to address the underlying causes. Sometimes they also bring a certain middle-class moral judgment to the role, something which, in my experience, becomes more prevalent the more senior the social work professional is.

From about the age of 14, I knew them as the hated authority – "staff" – when I was "in care" at an adolescent unit. This was not a disciplinary institution, although a list of my petty misdemeanours at that point would have resembled Cartman's confession ("and then this one time …"). It was just a place, underfunded and not very pleasant, where mostly damaged working-class children lived when there was nowhere else to put them.

And when I say "damaged", this is to give you no idea of the depravities involved. There was, for example, a quietly disturbed boy who insisted on repeatedly breaking into my bedroom while I was out, and leaving a shit under my mattress. But it wasn't all excitement. Most of the time, it was sheer boredom.

In those pre-internet years, we filled endless hours of no money and nothing to do by exchanging brutal put-downs: sitting for hours in a poky room with haunted looking underaged smokers, tearing into one another's weaknesses, and laughing like dogs. Otherwise, the humdrum was enlivened by someone flipping out and being restrained by staff, running away, breaking a window, or getting so badly drunk on cheap cider that they needed to have their stomach pumped.

For most of the inhabitants, there are two ways out of this. They can be moved back to an imperfect, perhaps oppressive family life. Or, at 17, they can be shifted into various half-way house situations, until they finally get benefits or a low-wage job and move into a flat. For me, there was a slim chance of getting a university place through clearance. Social services offered plenty of support to make this happen, and didn't even throw a strop when I dropped out to pursue exciting opportunities as a precarious call centre worker.

So: what should I, or my family, have been billed for all of this? This is the question inescapably posed by Worcestershire county council this week, as it has announced that it will consider ways to charge children or their carers for social services. Social workers will assess families and children over 16 to decide whether they can pay for care services. The cost can go up to £10,000 a year, with legal action for non-compliance.

What is the justification for this? The council's head of children's social care argues that: "There are rare cases where parents who can offer their children a home again refuse to do so, and this policy also allows us to ask those parents for a contribution towards the cost of their care." Yet, even if this wasn't a greasy bit of innuendo, such a sweeping change can hardly be attributed to "rare cases".

Underlying all this is the austerity state. It is not a matter of reducing the cost of services – often the last thing that happens. Neoliberals have used public indebtedness to leverage a process of cuts which tend to simply reorganise the state and reconceptualise what it does. According to this ideology, every form of human behaviour can be understood through the filter of economic transactions. Everything we do is utility-maximising, and anything we possess that can be used to generate an income stream, whether it's a car or a strong back, is a bit of capital.

For states to be run efficiently, therefore, they must build market mechanisms into their structure and balance budgets by generating income wherever possible. Increasingly, state providers are situated as outsourcing firms for services that individuals can't provide for themselves. You need to be rescued from a bad family, and maybe learn a few basic survival skills? Great! Very entrepreneurial! But you have to pay for the service.

This can only make life harder. Families in breakdown and children in need are often reluctant to ask the authorities for anything. If they are to be audited and shaken down for a fee as soon as feasible, many won't bother. And as the state ceases to care for working-class children, it represses them more. Kids who never see a social worker can always be curfewed, "crimboed" or sent to violent prisons.

Worcestershire is not an aberration, and it is unlikely to end there. In such a dystopia as now awaits us, I doubt I could have aspired to be a university drop-out. So, as I say, I'm glad of my regular contact with social workers.